With the upcoming 787 Dreamliner, Boeing is bringing the same lightweight technology to passenger aircraft, with 50 percent of the plane—mostly the fuselage—made of carbon fiber. We had a chance to visit Boeing with the McLaren MP4-12C, uniting two vehicles sharing similar structural DNA.

What are the main structural and performance advantages of using carbon fiber in your aircraft?

Carbon fiber offers a number of advantages. Because is has great strength-to-weight capability compared to traditional aerospace materials, it allows us to create more efficient designs—structurally and aerodynamically. One look at the 787's wings will demonstrate this point. Additionally, with advanced carbon-fiber composite design, we get more fatigue capability when sizing designs for static strength. This has allowed us to be more fatigue-tolerant in our designs, resulting in bigger passenger windows and a lower cabin altitude [more comfortable cabin pressure] in cruise than traditional jetliners.

Carbon fiber has been around for a while; what are the challenges that delayed its use in the Dreamliner?

Boeing has used composites in our airplane designs for more than 40 years. We began using advanced carbon-fiber composites in the primary structure of the 777 in 1995, so we have a lot of experience with it. The difficulty has been in making sure we have the manufacturing processes and capabilities that allow us to take full advantage of carbon fiber's capabilities, and to do this in an economical fashion.

What recent advances have made it possible to use greater quantities of carbon fiber?

The advances that have served us well have been in the technologies that allow automated layup of the one-piece fuselage barrels and the large wing structures. These have helped provide economical approaches that bring significant advances in quality and weight.

What are the limits that prevent you from using carbon fiber for your entire aircraft?

For each component in an airplane design, we carefully balance a number of requirements in the selection of the materials—weight, stiffness, manufacturability, cost, thermal stability, electrical conductivity, to name a few. In each case, the material selected provides the best balance of a multitude of requirements. In some cases, the result is carbon-fiber composite materials, in some cases it is one of a variety of metals, in some cases it is a different type of material such as fiberglass or acrylics. It all depends on the application. By weight, carbon fiber makes up about half of the 787.

What other materials can be used in the future that are even better than carbon fiber?

That's a tough question to answer. I'm still looking for a material system that has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than carbon fiber or metal, weighs less than air, conducts electricity, is available in large quantities, and is provided free of charge!